Sadness may not be the right word to define my feelings in that swamp. It was a kind of feeling that didn’t have a counter. A sentiment without antonyms. Happiness was not its opposite; instead, the feeling was so absolute it disallowed even the thought of a shade to its blackness. I lowered my head. I remember he stopped. He just froze. Instantaneously. I pleaded for him to keep moving, but he wouldn’t budge, smack in the middle of a bog that reached his knees, the surface just beneath my toes. He spoke not a word. I was so frightened I couldn’t own up to my responsibility, and before I dared peel myself away, I preferred to blame it on the music, its tempo, andante moderato, that melody as light as it was heavy, like flour, which thickens with liquid into a mass. I tried to shake him up, intensify his pulse, his breathing, whatever would speed up his slackening pace. I whispered quickly in his ear. I shouted. I encouraged him. I pulled at his shirt. But he wouldn’t dislodge himself. Solid as a marble slab.
Then we started to sink. When the mud reached the level of his groin, it covered my ankles; up to his waist it was at my knees; up to his chest it reached my chest too. I was terrified. He was sinking and taking me with him. The surface of the mud rose like a tide darkening the earth with the sea. I watched his white skin stain from the bottom up till it reached his neck. My white man was growing dark. Only then did I finally dismount, not so much to help him as to avoid being carried along with him. For some reason, I didn’t sink. It was as if he was in quicksand and I was on solid ground. For the first time in ages, I was more stable than someone else, and when I snapped into action and tried to rescue him, it was for him, not just for me. But it was too late. I pulled at his wrists so hard I’m sure it must have hurt him. He mouthed words without making any noise, trying to accommodate his tongue as if this muscle had also become weak. For a few minutes I thought that was all he wanted. To accommodate his tongue seemed like his last wish as he was sinking.
The mud reached his lips and I pulled even harder. I could hear the music in my head moving at the same slow yet brisk pace, like a bad horse pulling my good horse to the bottom of the mire. I sobbed. I insulted him. Then I asked him to forgive me for having overburdened him. I begged him to react and told him I would never mount him again. I promised that he would recover his ability to resist without me. I pulled his hair; I did everything I could. And when the soft black sands covered his teeth and his nose and his vacant eyes and the last curve of his white ears, I hated him. He’d pulled me out of the trench I’d hidden in, that kitchen of my own despair, for this? Once he’d disappeared entirely, once all that was left of him were a few thick bubbles of heavy air, the remnant of what had been in his lungs, I was all alone again. Alone in the middle of that swamp. I cursed him for leaving me that way again, and for taking my four legs away. Then I cursed myself.
I never reported his disappearance. If they’d found his cadaver, they would have looked for a weapon, and I’m afraid the weapon had been me, the excessive encumbrance of my body’s 110 pounds. What weighs more—my father asked me when I was young—a pound of straw or a pound of iron? I always answered straw. There was no way that he could make me see how a pound weighs a pound regardless of the material. I realize he was right now, because even as a child I intuited my destiny or my chastisement: to lug around a sack full of iron strands when everyone else saw straw. Since nobody could see or suspect that I was carrying a satchel full of iron, nobody could relieve me. Your death, Jim, added more iron to my satchel. Exhausted, I ended up imposing it on Irrational Number. But in the end he couldn’t take the added weight. My colossal man of lead was gone, my heavy horse. The shape of him left in the curve of my two lonely thighs, I’m writing you now a little livelier perhaps, but not too much.
Once I’d lost all my trust in psychology and its servant, psychiatry, I had to get over my agoraphobia, Jim, without anyone else’s help. I went back to our apartment. Since I had to walk my dog, little by little I started going farther away from home, just as I had before with its mother. So two generations of dogs had become familiar with my depression, though this last bout now appears to be allowing me to rise above the surface and breathe a little fresh air, after breathing the same stale air for so long, my lungs being like those fountains that recycle water over and over again, with a sign that reads NOT POTABLE WATER. DO NOT DRINK. That’s how I’ve been breathing over these years, a closed circuit of air recirculating in my lungs without ever renewing itself. TOXIC AIR. DO NOT BREATHE. So that’s what I decided: I needed to learn how to stop breathing so that little by little I could open up to some fresh air. That’s how this new phase began.
I don’t know if you recall, from wherever you are now, the sports center between the apartment and the park where they were constructing an Olympic pool just when you left for Minneapolis. When I passed by the other day, I noticed the poster announcing open registration for apnea school. Nobody I asked knew what the sport of apnea is, but I remember the legends my mother used to tell me about women in my country who would dive down deep into the sea to hunt for pearls, tankless, using only their lungs. I’ve always known there was one thing I could count on since I was orphaned early in life and had to survive on my own, as you know, first as a boy and then as a girl. One thing never failed me, even gave me the audacity to question my gender, my sexual identity—the first marker people use to distinguish between individuals. This one tool I trusted so much is my intuition, which is connected to the wellness of my body and to pleasure, and is what drives my natural predilection for things that are not only pleasant but also good for me. By the same token, this intuition is what guided me to giving the sport a try.
I consulted with our general practitioner. I hadn’t wanted to see him again after losing you. So I had changed doctors. I couldn’t bear to give him the news. But when I walked into his clinic, he saw me and approached me to say that he had already heard the news. He seemed sorry and sad, but also visibly happy to see me again. You know? People think it’s better not to raise the subject with the loved ones of the deceased. When I lost you, people stopped talking to me about you. After the first days passed, there were days, even weeks, when it felt like you died all over again; that you died every day, over and over. At first I wasn’t sure where the feeling was coming from, but soon enough I figured it out. You were being killed on a daily basis, Jim, by the silence that had absorbed the place of your name. All the chitchat about everyday things was lost on me at that time. Your death brought absolute depth to any conversation, like apnea, and that obliged me either to talk plainly about your death or else about topics that involved nonexistence, perhaps subjects that many people find painful to discuss, but it was in them that I could see the representation of your emptiness. I needed to talk about you as much as I needed to use your toothbrush—which by the way, you forgot at home—brushing until my gums would bleed. You see? All that nonsense about not mentioning the noose in the house of a hanged man is a big lie. I needed to talk about the noose and its texture, who manufactured it, how the neighbor hanged himself in exactly the same way. More than anything else, I needed to talk about the hanged person. I wanted to talk about my departed one, and if I couldn’t talk about my own, at least let me talk about other deceased people or about death itself, any subject that really allowed me to talk about you. I would have loved for everyone who knew you to come over, not to keep quiet or to see me in grief, but to say your name. I would have been grateful if the fireman who removed you from the tangle of the car’s steel had described your last look to me. But it didn’t happen that way.